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David's most significant contribution

Reading the tributes, I suspect I am not alone in being moved by the descriptions of the many ways in which David touched us individually. If you haven't yet done so, please feel free to add your personal tribute as a New Thread to the David Grove forum.

As well as the impact of the man, there is also the impact of his ideas and work, though of course they are closely interlinked. David had so many ideas and developed them in all sorts of directions over many years. Few if any of us are fully familiar with them all.

My question is:

What IN YOUR OPINION was David's most significant contribution? *

Please post your comment as a Post Reply to this thread. If enough people respond, it may become a forum of its own.

* I realise the question is packed with metaphorical non-cleanliness. You could instead answer the technically more Clean Language-like but linguistically laborious: 'What do you like most that David had happen?'. If you don't like either of these, you could use what David referred to as "intelligence - inter + legere - in other words, 'read between the lines'" and answer the question that you think I meant to or should have asked!

I am asking out of curiosity and to promote a debate that may inform us all. I am only choosing to ask for the 'most significant contribution' to encourage you to summarise and be brief. If there are several and you prefer not to prioritise them, do put them all in - just please be concise. If yours has already been posted, do please post yours anyway - who knows what may emerge?

David's impression on me personally

Well like so many of you possibly where do I start and how do I keep it short and 'clean'

Impossible, so I shall prattle here first.

Year after year, in fact for 18 years, David came back to New Zealand and each time he worked with me on a personal level.

This was always before, after or during, telling me all the things I needed manage or arrange for him. And telling me about his most wonderful new idea, that was always over my head, I could not keep up with the Genius that was David's brain.

The amazing thing for me, was that every year, David remembered exactly what I was working on and where we had left off, last year.

David changed my life.

From my living, well drowning, in a black place, he enabled me to see the sun.

I will be grateful for that forever.

The 'clean' part of this post is - that David's incredible recall made a huge impression on me.

The I in Therapy

For me, David’s greatest contribution was to create a method of eliciting information from the client and staying out of the way of that information (and the client!) so the client can do the work herself/himself—to get rid of the “I” of the therapist, as Steve Briggs said in his tribute.

David trusted me that somewhere inside I knew what needed to happen next (and I still do), and that my solutions were far better than any he could come up with, because they were contained within my “problem.” I find the elegance and simplicity of the logic behind this premise astounding and revolutionary, and I think it is the genesis of many of the ideas he developed over the years.

David's most important contribution

David realised the cause and effects of dissociation. All his work was centred upon recovering the not-here-and-now aspects of self. All his stages of work reflect different, and progressively more effective ways of achieving this. He knew that the individual person's system was unique and would find its own content way. He said he never asked a question unless he knew what the answer would be!

Grovian Metaphor was designed to enable the inner/outer child aspect to morph into a form were they could touch the present body and thus migrate "home". Symbolic Modelling is a simplified application of this work.

Clean Space was created to more directly access the Child Without, using spatial navigation to enable the undoing of the dissociation.

Emergence brought together in a hugely more powerful and efficient form all of the purposes of his earlier work. The purpose of emergent question patterns was to navigate between aspects of self, thus reconnecting/migrating them even less traumatically and even more cleanly in terms of reducing practitioner input".

David also accepted everyone as they are. He only taught or passed on what others could understand of his work, and he was indifferent to the opinion of others.

[Note from forumadmin: remainder of this post mail and the replies to it have been moved to continue in the Emergent Knowledge forum]

The artist

Steve: "Why do people dissociate?
Dissociation serves to: preserve that which cannot tolerate an experience, measure the experience for later understanding. It's an aspect of projected awareness, which is an ongoing continuous activity, but separated by measurement/interrupt.

How do they dissociate?
If the awareness is interrupted then the smooth flow of out-to-object-back-to-me is broken and that which was at object and the space in between is left as a structure. The person gets cold (shock) and eventually warms up. When the dissociation is undone they heat up with the extra returned energy - evidenced with hundreds of people.

Where do they go when they do dissociate?
The go into the object(s) of focus of awareness - perpetrator's eyes, wallpaper pattern, a sponge, literally whatever.

How does one recover dissociated aspects of self?
By navigating space/time or movement to the recorded real-world event, noticing the points of focus and interrogating them, then by navigating back to the here and now. (Hey, this is like timeline - yes, but somewhat cleaner!)"

I think David's skill and art to do this, is his most important contribution to psychotherapy. Unlike other approaches he managed to not-trigger the experience directly, which would have reinforced it, but to smoothly and gently avoid it even more than the brain would itself, so by well-balancing and dosing 'call' it back from whence it got lost and to make A at T-1 the owner again, who is now able to deal with it.